The variances in rural economies, machines breaking the peace, questionable home brews and an unexpected turn into how we view time – can you point at January?
Richard and Richard attempt to navigate unpredictable seas on the good ship CountrySlide whilst Callum is away taking photos of lovely people and even lovelier port!
CountrySlide is a podcast that looks at farming, conservation and life in the British countryside. Send us photos of your interesting trinkets that your other half wants to burn or bin as submissions to the calendar or for fun at: contact@countryslide.co.uk
Edited and Produced by Amy Green.
This transcript was generated using AI and may contain minor errors.
Richard Prideaux: A dog has farted in this room and I think I might expire before the end of this podcast.
Richard Negus: Diet dogs don't fart. Very, very rare. And if they do, it's genteel and doesn't even smell.
Richard Prideaux: I don't believe you.
Richard Negus: No, honestly, they're remarkable. The digestive system of the cocker spaniel is a highly refined thing, and we feed—hold on—hashtag Dr John's Gold with Chicken. I hope they're listening. That seems to do their old system, but I also add a little bit of whatever is left over. So at the moment they're also eating cabbage, Brussels sprouts, carrots, a bit of gravy and some lamb. If they were other dogs, they'd be smelling like a midden, but no, good old cockers.
Richard Prideaux: Or that's based on those leftovers, never mind the cockers. What's your digestive system like?
Richard Negus: Well, you know, I've just burnt it all off. So I think, you know, as soon as it goes in, it's just gone at the moment. For a man of my age, I shouldn't be working so bloody hard.
Richard Prideaux: Well, you've got all those taxes to pay for, haven't you?
Richard Negus: Well, yes, and they keep expanding by the moment.
Richard Prideaux: You've got this weird thing with taxes. Taxes in the UK particularly have been used as a sort of a nudge unit to steer you away from behaviour they'd rather you didn't do. So there's an extra tax on fossil fuels because we'd rather you went to EVs and there's more of a tax on alcohol and smoking because it's bad for you. I can only assume that they don't actually want us to work then.
Richard Negus: No.
Richard Prideaux: Because that seems to be what the steering is.
Richard Negus: Well, I think what they don't want to have happen, and if you actually look at the budget And also a lot of the stealth taxes that have come in, everything from agricultural property relief through to the 20% VAT going on for private school fees and all the various things is what they're actually trying to stop you from doing is being self-employed. They're trying to get you back into being employed by someone else because I think what they don't like is firstly the independence of the self-employed, the small business man or woman, the sole trader, the partnership, the business that possibly employs two or three other people. it's always been something where you've got the Sword of Damocles hanging over you, if you don't get the work in or that you become sick or something like that, you suddenly stop earning and you're in the mire. But on the flip side was it was always the much more tax efficient option. You know, you could run your vehicle through the system. You could put things through for tax, and I don't think they like that. I think they want us to stop being that independent individual. I think they want you back in the system so that you are working for either a large corporation or better still, something within the state itself. I think they want us all, Richard, to become civil servants.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, it does seem that the only thing this is worth doing is working for the state, paying money back into the state in that entirely closed circular system. You don't want to be messy or anything else. So what have you been doing in your rural, disruptive, subversive life today?
Richard Negus: Well, I have been planting hedges rather than laying them. So I like to call it forward planning because in 8 to 10 years time they will have to be laid. So keep yourself in work. But this one's quite interesting because half of it is on farmland where they just wanted to put another hedge because it was a rather big, open and barren field. So they were putting a hedge back in that probably had been there. I would have thought by the boundary trees that are in there. But also I am putting in a hedge to mask the hideousness that is a solar farm. So yes, and that is, I have to say, do you know, Richard, this is a funny thing, is When I've been doing the book tours and stuff like that, and then one of the repeated refrains is, oh, it must be lovely to work out in the beautiful countryside all the time. It's so peaceful. Yeah, right. Okay, this is all I have heard all day whilst I've been planting 750 flipping hedge whips was, keep clear, mind out, mind out, mind out, mind out, because these dudes who are working in the solar farm, they're putting all the electricity cables in. And so there's three guys, one's working in this great big 360 digger, one is working on a dumper truck and another one is the groundworker who's basically putting all the cabling in. So he's got to sit in this ditch. And on this 360 digger, it's got this all-seeing eye that if you come within a certain distance of this vehicle through 360 degrees of it, sees you and goes, mind out, keep clear, mind out, mind out, mind out, mind out. This went on all day. And then in between bouts of when the bloke wasn't stood in front of it, the Royal Air Force decided to fly their sucking great big wastes of money over our head doing aerobatics and other assorted pansiness that the RAF do. So they were doing sort of Top Gun impressions over us. And I thought, yeah, you know them people who said to me, it must be lovely working out there in the beautiful countryside. Well, it was until modern technology came in and ruined it all. Mind out, mind out, mind out.
Richard Prideaux: We say, you know, it can't be turned off and it won't work without it. Presumably there's a speaker there at some level. So what if you take a flat-bladed screwdriver and just goose that speaker? So it's going off but no one can hear it. Maybe dogs can hear it.
Richard Negus: Well, I think a little man actually did come out in the service vehicle. I don't quite know what they were doing, but I think they were trying to see if they could turn this feature off. He stayed all day and it was still going, “Mind out, mind out,†as the sun was setting at four. So obviously he wasn't able to do it. I used to know someone who worked for a professional plumbers' merchant. They had a delivery driver who everyone in the company hated because he was just an idle loafer. He would drive up and wouldn't get out of his cab, so everyone had to unload all the stuff. One of the guys who worked there had been a mechanic or something. The vehicle had one of those things that, when he put it into reverse, went, “Caution, this vehicle's reversing. Caution, this vehicle's reversing.†I don't know how he did it, but he fiddled around with the little box and changed the playback speed. So instead it sounded like Mickey Mouse: “Beep, beep, this vehicle is reversing. Beep, beep, caution, this vehicle is reversing.†Apparently this bloke had no idea how to turn it off, so he drove around for months afterwards. Every time he appeared, there was this Mickey Mouse voice coming out of the back of his vehicle. He knew someone at this depot had done it, but he didn't know who or how they'd done it, and he couldn't turn it off. I thought that was absolutely brilliant. That's a way to get your own back on someone.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, that is. This modern tech for plant machinery doesn't make anything safer, really. All it does is feed into that thing I talked about a few months ago: to do anything on certain sites now, you have to leap through all sorts of hoops for CSCS cards, construction safety and all these other things. You can't get any work done until you've been through an hour-long toolbox talk in a Portakabin before you're allowed out to do your job, which they don't know how to do. They have no idea how to do it, because that's why you're there. But then they're asking, “Are you working safely?†Yeah, sure I am. Just believe me.
Richard Negus: I'm sure that what somebody's done at some point is that they have worked out the cost in lost productivity is probably lower than the potential court case from the various ambulance-chasing lawyers who are waiting like vultures in the wings to swoop. Should anyone sustain an injury at work, then subsequently say, did you have this briefing? Did this individual have this ticket? Was this person made aware of this? Were you given this piece of equipment? Did you have this safety feature on this? And I think that's how you end up with it. A friend of mine, one of the dads at Charlie's rugby, also plays for your favourite place, Richard: Diss Rugby Football Club. I'm fighting the urge—yes, I know. Diss is really good. So you've got Diss, right? Even in Diss they put puns on “Diss is the place†and all this sort of stuff for little cafés and things. Just next door, over into Suffolk, you've got Eye. If you've got a place called Eye, as in eyeball, there are more Eye puns in Eye than you can shake a stick at. It's brilliant. I mean, but unfortunately they haven't got an optician's. I would have just opened an optician's there just for the larks and the laughs. But anyway, but this pal of mine is a senior solicitor for the National Health Service. And he said that the amount of NHS money that goes on paying people for claims, he said, which are largely spurious. But he said, we just work out that there is a threshold which we say, do you know what? It's actually cheaper to pay this [bleep] who is claiming for something that was nobody's fault, or they weren't actually impacted to any degree like they were, but their ambulance-chasing lawyer is suggesting they were. There is a threshold where we say it's just too expensive to go and stand up to these lying thieves, what they basically are. He said, it's just cheaper for us to go and pay up. So when you go and say, Wes Streeting, we'll go and say, we need this X amount of money in the NHS budget. If what we're seeing in the county of Norfolk, where this goes, and the counties of Suffolk, that we know just how much is being forked out, this is happening. in all the counties in England, then no wonder the NHS is just a bottomless hole because there's basically [bleep] lawyers, all these no-win, no-fee lawyers who are out there. They are literally emptying the coffers of the NHS and it's going in no pocket of anyone other than lawyers and people who don't deserve the money.
Richard Prideaux: Depending on when this comes out—well, I know when this is coming out. It's coming out on Thursday for patrons and Friday for everyone else. My next Scribehound article might be out by then, which is abnormal because I'm normally early in the month. It followed a conversation I had a couple of weekends ago. People were suggesting solutions to the question of what to do with game from shoots. If the game dealers aren't buying it, what do you do with all these birds? One suggestion was, “You just need to find a good butcher locally and then people will take them.†It got me thinking that isn't always true. There's a big disparity in disposable income between different parts of the country, particularly at the moment. There are rich parts of the countryside and poor parts, and it isn't always easy to tell. Even when you look at somewhere like Cambridgeshire, it's relatively high earning, but mostly because of Cambridge. Take Cambridge out and the average wages drop right down. So that's what my article is about: basically, you can have half the disposable income from one county to another. Denbighshire to Surrey, I think we have just over half the average earnings.
Richard Negus: Yeah. I would imagine that is precisely it. And I mean, it's awesome. I mean, I'll give our local butcher, Mr Dunnett in Eye. He opens very early and he stays open all day Saturday because a hell of a lot of butchers will actually shut at 1:00 on a Saturday. And I think one of the One of the issues with butchers, and it's why people use supermarkets, is because the supermarket is open when most people have the time to go shopping. And also, who wants to walk around with a shopping bag? The fact is that now car parking is expensive. If you don't park in the supermarket car park, the town centres and their infinite wisdom go and say, well, we'll charge you to park. I'm glad Eye doesn't charge you to park. Although they do send the parking Nazis to put tickets on there. And I felt like going and throttling and then I thought, no, you're only doing your job. But some lunatic in County Hall decided to send people into Eye to put tickets on cars belonging to people who were probably in there shopping and now they're going to go, I'll stuff it. I'll just go to Morrisons in Diss instead. And so then Eye will slowly continue to die. But back to your point about butchers: the problem with a lot of these small shops, they are not open when most people have the time to do their shopping. So it is difficult.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. It's like if you're open 9 till 5, you are saying, and only really open in weekdays, you are saying, I never want to sell to somebody who's got a normal job.
Richard Negus: Yeah, basically. Yeah. I can sell to the elderly, I can sell to the unemployed, and I can sell to the random few who are who are self-employed and might go and say, I must go and do that.
Richard Prideaux: Writers.
Richard Negus: Yeah, writers.
Richard Prideaux: People researching the next piece.
Richard Negus: Exactly. It is bizarre. And I know what we all should do. I mean, Claire's amazing when she goes shopping. She's decided to buy British wherever possible. She's not at the point of buying very expensive coffee from some little artisan roastery because we're not as rich as Croesus. But on the whole, it's British and she buys usually from little independent green grocers and butchers and whatnot. But she's now decided against buying me KitKats, Gold Bars and things like that, or Penguins, for my packed lunch. She is now making her own version of Snickers bars and chocolate bars. Yes. She makes them with dates and things.
Richard Prideaux: That's not normal. That's not normal behaviour.
Richard Negus: She's decided that nothing processed is allowed near us. So nothing that's got palm oil or anything like that in is coming in the house anymore. That's her line in the sand. It actually works out slightly more expensive. But I mean, yeah.
Richard Prideaux: So the next time I come to stay and we're having venison of indeterminate origin outside on the patio, we won't be having BBQ sauce with it unless you've found a way to make it.
Richard Negus: Oh, I know how to make barbecue sauce. I have a recipe and it involves sort of lots of vinegar and stuff, but I use a lot of Worcestershire sauce. It's still made in England, in Worcestershire and by Lea & Perrins. And so I use that rather than HP. And it's not hairshirt-wearing. It's because, you know, you and I write a lot about how stuff should be. This podcast a lot of the time is how stuff should be. So therefore, if we're just paying lip service and actually living on the hog and not doing it, then we're no better than George Monbiot or Guy Shrubsole. Do you know what I mean? So it's something that we do, but it's because Claire is a self-employed potter and she does all this amazing stuff in between bouts of producing beautiful things. So she can do that. Let's be honest. If you're working as a school receptionist, are you going to have the time to do that? Probably not.
Richard Prideaux: Interesting choice of random person to pick there.
Richard Negus: My sister-in-law is a school receptionist. There we go.
Richard Prideaux: I'll say that didn't come out of nowhere. That was planted by the Manchurian candidate in your head.
Richard Negus: Absolutely. Yes, it was exactly. I'll tell Helen that she is the Manchurian candidate.
Richard Prideaux: You and I also are old enough to remember when this used to be the norm. I should probably say that now Callum isn't on this week's episode because I wasn't actually paying attention really to his excuse as to why he couldn't come. It was something to do with work and photography in London, but I don't…
Richard Negus: I think it was something with port, wasn't it?
Richard Prideaux: Is he on tawny port again?
Richard Negus: I think so. He just, I've never known anyone other than John Jorrocks in an R. S. Surtees novel be involved more with port than Callum. And this is crazy. He ought to have gout just by the adjacency that he has to port all the time.
Richard Prideaux: No, there was that point in the Game Fair where we were at one of the weird drinks parties you got us invited to and I'm standing there sweating in the heat, drinking iced tawny port, thinking this is not good for you.
Richard Negus: No, that was in the GWCT, wasn't it? Yeah, I think it was Cockburn's. I think they had sponsored the drinks party there. Yeah, and they had various ports, which I have to say I love port. But to me it just reeks of winter. It is not a summer drink. I mean, if you weren't going to have a beer, now I know that you're quite keen on odd beers, ones you have to drink with a spoon. If you weren't going to have a beer, right, What would you go for in a pub? I'm not talking about sort of, your usual sherry as you mooch around the house with.
Richard Prideaux: An episode of Frasier.
Richard Negus: Exactly.
Richard Prideaux: Commenting on the nuttiness of the sherry.
Richard Negus: But if you were actually out somewhere, what would you have in a pub if it wasn't a beer?
Richard Prideaux: Cider.
Richard Negus: There you go.
Richard Prideaux: Cider is a year-round drink. It can be light, it can be heavy, it can be cold, it can be warm. It is a universal.
Richard Negus: Yes.
Richard Prideaux: The problem is as you get older, cider has more and more of an effect on you, I think, and the sulphites particularly, but cider hangovers, I used to be able to shake off quite easily and now they've sort of latched on a bit.
Richard Negus: Yeah. Do you know, I'm very fortunate is that, you know, because not only do I try and eat British all the time and everything's got to be British other than my car, which is a Subaru. But we beat Japan. So therefore I feel fine about driving.
Richard Prideaux: So you're like British cars or countries we've beaten in war?
Richard Negus: Exactly. That's basically it.
Richard Prideaux: That opens up the market quite broadly. Exactly.
Richard Negus: Yes. So, you know, my claret consumption is without any qualms at all. But the, you know, Aspall's cider down the road from us, although it has since been bought by Coors and is no longer Chevallier Guild family-owned. But Aspall cider has stayed true to itself. And I don't think there are sulphites in that. And so therefore, you can drink it and not get a headache. But it is ridiculously strong. And if you buy their Premier Cru, which is something like 7.5%, and you go, this is very moreish. And you're sort of sipping away on a nice hot day out on the patio out there. And before you know it, you're eating gravel. It's terrible. You know, you start thinking it's a really good idea to jump off the roof.
Richard Prideaux: It sneaks up on you, doesn't it? And then mugs you at the end. See, I grew up on Healey's, so things like Rattler.
Richard Negus: Okay, yeah.
Richard Prideaux: And Rattler is not, it's not really cider, it's sort of sugar and alcohol and regret all in a bottle. Nothing good has ever happened, but a lot of memorable things have happened.
Richard Negus: I'm with you on the cider, but the other thing that I could drink in a pub, see, I couldn't drink a gin and tonic because when I pour myself a gin and tonic, it's quite a hefty slug of gin. And if you go to the landlord and say, can I have a quadruple gin and tonic, please? And I'll need, you know, Can I have a pint of G&T, please? Yeah, my sister used to drink that when she was a yuppie. Yeah, it was quite funny. But anyway, I digress. The only thing that I think I could, I'm with you on the cider, but I think I can go and drink these days because of my advanced years, I think I can drink a glass of red wine now. I think, people look at me and they don't think, “He's a pretentious young manâ€. They now think, oh, look at that dear old thing. He's probably got a dicky bladder. So he's on the wine.
Richard Prideaux: Wine is a nice all-rounder as well, actually. And as you say, it's sort of it's acceptable at your age, but it's just acceptable all round now as well, isn't it? It's the normal choice.
Richard Negus: Well, I was out beating at the weekend, our first day at Rivers Hall, which is my favourite estate in this region, and Mabel likes it very much. And it's always wonderful when you stop for elevenses, because out comes the drink. The gamekeeper there is a wonderful man called Robert Graves. Not the poet, but he is a poet amongst gamekeepers. He's a wonderful, wonderful man. And most of the guys there seem to be related to him in some way. And his brother makes these concoctions. I mean, he's a chip off your block, or you're probably a chip off him because he's a lot older than you, because he footles around in hedges picking stuff. But then he finds the most bizarre spirits to put them with. So you go, oh, what's that then? Oh, that's me damson Cointreau. You what? Well, I take Cointreau and then I put sugar and damsons in it. So you've taken an orange liqueur and you've then put damsons in it and sugar and you try it and you go, cor, blimey. It's like Tixylix, but with a kick. It's utterly bizarre. And then so each time there is this strangely coloured one and he goes, I found this in the back of the cupboard and it's brown. And he goes, what is it? And he goes, I think it's walnut liqueur. And you go, okay, I'll try that. And you go, I'm not getting any walnut, but I am definitely getting, I think it's Lifebuoy soap.
Richard Prideaux: There are two things from that. One is I have no idea where I'd actually get Cointreau. You know, if you said you've got an hour to go and get a bottle of Cointreau, I have no idea where I'd go. I didn't even think they still sold it. And then another thing is you've just broken a memory of my mate Tom trying to make a wild garlic brandy liqueur. Oh my Lord. It smelled like wet spaniel.
Richard Negus: Nice.
Richard Prideaux: It was the least appetising thing you could think of.
Richard Negus: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: But he was convinced it was going to work. But no, wild garlic brandy liqueur, no. If any listeners want to try that, and we'll have to wait till next spring, but if you want to try that, then let us know the results, but please don't bring us a bottle.
Richard Negus: No. What was that weird thing that Avian Sandercock was saying? Didn't he make something like lobster liqueur or something weird?
Richard Prideaux: Oh, yes. Well, yeah, because he's tried everything, alcoholic it seems. Wasn't there some, it was something in, where does he go to? Not the Balearics, Canary Islands, Canary Islands, somewhere overseas, somewhere foreign.
Richard Negus: Devon for him.
Richard Prideaux: Clotted cream.
Richard Negus: Yeah, clotted cream. That's it. Clotted cream. No, just stop it. That's not what it is. Daft as putting damsons and Cointreau together. It's what people do. I can remember when Claire used to work in whisky, the company she worked for tried to rejazzle and bejazzle Bailey's and they had to make a vegan Bailey's because that was it when...
Richard Prideaux: Cow juice, yeah.
Richard Negus: They didn't like that bit being in there. And so they made a big deal out of the fact that it had almond water. I'm not going to call it milk because it's not.
Richard Prideaux: Almond squeezings.
Richard Negus: Almond squeezings, yes, quite. And you know, you think, just stop it. I mean, obviously, thank God, veganism is now like the Draylon slacks. It is no longer a fashionable thing. And if you are still a vegan, then you're in it for the long haul and I salute you. But thank God, the fashion thing of being a vegan has now gone and you don't have a stupid extra page that no one looks at in a pub or restaurant menu.
Richard Prideaux: No, sort of wild game and eating venison and things like that are actually now getting quite trendy, which can only be a good thing. We were talking about that at the job I was working at today, but something else came up in that conversation or just after that. And I thought, I'm going to save this for the podcast tonight because this could go one of two ways. Let's see. So I want you to think about today's date. It is the 2nd of December, 2025. I'd just like you to visualise that now. So, you know, how do you visualise time? So think about where you are now on our date. Where's January? Where's next January from you?
Richard Negus: Next January.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, not the one we had 11 months ago. Next January after Christmas.
Richard Negus: It's a month away, isn't it?
Richard Prideaux: But can you point to it?
Richard Negus: Yeah, okay.
Richard Prideaux: One o'clock.
Richard Negus: If it's a clock, one o'clock.
Richard Prideaux: One o'clock. So it's sort of a circle. So are your years a circle?
Richard Negus: Yes, probably, because I live a cyclical life. So yes, probably.
Richard Prideaux: So this is the thing we were trying to work out. Do people who work with seasons and farmers and growers, because it was a farmer I was talking to, do you see things as just a circle? So you have a big reset at Christmas and then it all starts over again. Or are you like someone else who was there, who sees time as a ladder? So you're going up the ladder and the future's up there and the past is down there below you.
Richard Negus: No, you see, I'm very much… That's very interesting.
Richard Prideaux: I know it's good. What is it?
Richard Negus: I very much do, because I live such a cyclical life. I'm always thinking, “Oh, the hedge-laying season has nearly come round again,†and then the hedge-laying season is here. I very much see an arm of a clock going round and coming back. And I think you're on to something there. I think people who depend upon, doesn't matter whether you're a farmer, a gardener, a hedger, coppicer, anyone who relies upon the natural world, I think they would see time in a circle. Whereas those who are less land-based would, exactly as you say, see time going off like the writing at the start of Star Wars.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah.
Richard Negus: How interesting.
Richard Prideaux: I've tried this with different people over the years and it's very interesting to hear the responses. Some people just go, what are you talking about? You can't see time. And it's like, well, you're a very boring person then, aren't you? I don't want to talk to you. But anyone who comes up with, oh yeah, well, I can see it like this. It's like, all right, there's a wedge there that's worth having a conversation with you. The next one is years. So if you think back to, say, the year 2000 from here, where is that relative to you now?
Richard Negus: You see that's interesting because I think about it in seasons as in I'll say last season we did this because it used to be when it was the hunting when hunting was my job it was I'd say that'd be season 93–94 and the rest of us, the rest of the time didn't really matter, and now it's much the same. So, yeah, I see years in seasons and I almost I hark back when I think back in time. Oh, I can remember that. That's when I did that hedge there. And so I think back on a landmark in it, because I can remember that year because I did that hedge then or a landmark figure for it. But most of the time I don't talk about years because my year is not actually 2025, then it's 2026 and then 27 and so on. I'm working season 25–26 at the moment, so therefore, I don't really actually think that the 1st of January in a way is the start of the year. I almost see it as midway through, I suppose.
Richard Prideaux: No, because I'm changing around because I used to do more when we had the wild food business and I used to, you know, I was foraging commercially amongst other things. We were starting a season in February; that was the first time we were sending anything out and you used to get almost depressed from November through to January because nothing was growing.
Richard Negus: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: So there was nothing to do. And then you start looking ahead to the season and it just builds to this crescendo in the summer and then starts to tail off again. So it was all about the growing season and my friend, a market gardener I was talking to today. Hello, Phil. He was basically saying the same thing because he's doing his veg boxes and all of this other stuff. There are basically potatoes and root crops and a few other bits that are going out at the moment, but it's going to tail off and then he'll start prepping the ground again for next year in February. Everyone must have their own little cycle of start and finish, which has got nothing to do with the, what are we, Gregorian or Julian calendar.
Richard Negus: We're Gregorian.
Richard Prideaux: We're Gregorian.
Richard Negus: Yeah. See, it's interesting because we didn't actually go out to work yesterday because it was peeing down. So we decided that planting hedges in the wet is dull anyway, but also where we were on that Norfolk clay, well, it just would slow us down to such a degree that it probably wouldn't have been profitable.
Richard Prideaux: Oh, you'd be 4 inches taller after 5 steps as well.
Richard Negus: Oh, absolutely. And the spade is just… everything's [unclear], so we didn't go. So I wrote my Scribehound piece yesterday, and I wrote it about the author Robert Smith Surtees, R. S. Surtees, most famous for the character John Jorrocks, and Mr Facey Romford's Hounds and Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour. But I noticed something when I'd gone back and started to reread them chronologically all through. I've got his entire works and I started reading again. And I noticed in there that there was a lot of relevance for today because of the challenges that the countryside had in Surtees' time, we're talking about him starting in the late 1830s and he died in about 1865 when he was writing them. So, you know, the end of Georgian and start of the Victorian to the height of the Victorian era, really, I suppose. But it's quite fascinating because all the things that he's whinging about are all exactly the self-same factors that we see now. They haven't got the luxuries of modern tractors and things like that so what you're seeing in these 1830s books comes back to your point that it's very much a cycle. And then I thought, well, it's not only a cycle that he's talking about, but the whole countryside is a cycle because we're going through one of those phases at the moment. We're back in Shitsville at the moment because forces beyond the control of those of us who work the land have put us through an agricultural depression. And he's writing around the time of the repeal of the corn laws and a crash in agricultural productivity and profitability during an agricultural depression. So I'm reading a book that was written in 1840 and it's exactly relevant today. Yes, it's a bit long-winded and Victorian in his language, but the subject matter could have been written this week by one of us in Scribehound. And so I wrote it about that. So it's rather apposite that you had this conversation with your mate about time and the future in the past.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, that's interesting because the cyclical nature of these events is captured in that overused phrase that does get used a lot by people who, for some reason, are obsessed with jiu-jitsu and lifting kettlebells, which is: “Hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times,†or something like that. That's the sort of four-stage cycle. But I read a thing—it's one of these things you read on Twitter and then you go and read it and go, oh yeah, I quite like that and you can't remember who sent it to you or where it was, I can't reference it, but it was talking about this thing of collapse of empires because everyone's talking about actually, you know, are we at the end of the American Empire? Is it collapsing like Rome did? And one of the bits the author brought in there was about cycles. And you actually get cycles within an empire. But what happens is the cycle rate gets shorter. So you get the same things happening every 100 years, but then it's every 85 years and then it's every 50 years. And as that cycle gets shorter between similar things happening, that's sort of the doom spiral of an empire. So maybe, if you're applying it to the rural side of things, [unclear]. Are we losing a decade every century? I think so.
Richard Negus: I think so. And I think it's one of those things that we probably have been a bit feather bedded here in Britain. Because although we have had depressions and downsides, really, I suppose, probably since the Elizabethan era. We've been [unclear]. Yes, we went and got our empire and we did all this wonderful stuff. And we've got to face the fact is that, yes, we can slag off Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer. It's very easy to do. I mean, it is so easy to do. I mean, it's almost, you know, taking-candy-from-babies territory. But all they have done is hasten the end. That's all they've done. It's not like they've caused this great big malady that we've got in this country. Their ineptitude has just sped it up. And probably the genius of Rishi Sunak, let's be honest, it was largely him, is he managed to paper over the cracks more effectively than any other chancellor for a long while. But we've been on a slow spiral into shitness since we won the Second World War. That's basically what's happened. And we've been going, and then this lot came in and went, bang. And we're just, this is the crash. I mean, that's the acceptance of it. And I think perhaps Britain is going to have to get used to the idea that we're actually a bit [bleep]. The countries like Italy and Poland that we used to laugh at 10 years ago are now the country that we were 10 years ago and we are now in the Italy and Poland territory and we just ought to perhaps accept our fate and if the cycle analogy is correct then we will start to spiral up. Will this be turned around by a storming Reform government, probably not. What they'll actually have to do is they're just going to they're going to really inherit the shitville and they'll have to make such hard decisions. Everyone's going to hate them. And then probably the Conservatives will come limping in like the sort of, you know, when you have one of those horse races where you've got three hot favourites and you've got one thing that looks like it should be pulling the beer wagon for Whitbread. Yes. Yeah. So you've got the three hot favourites, and they're racing round and the poor old cart horse is three fences behind and basically the three hot favourites bring one another down at the second last and good old Dobbin is lobbing along. I think that's what the Conservatives are going to be like. They're going to be like this old Dobbin is they're going to come back and they're going to say, “Hello, we're back now. We're going to go and just sort everything out because we'll have a great excitement with reform. Everyone's then going to go, I don't like them. They're telling us the truth all the time. It's horrible. We don't like it. That's someone who's going to sort it out. And they'll be like, Nanny McPhee, the Conservatives have come back in with some man in a grey suit in charge and go, okay, let's sort it all out.
Richard Prideaux: With any luck, we'll be at war with Russia before then anyway. So it'll just distract everyone, won't it?
Richard Negus: Well, it will do. Yes, I mean, that'd be great. Did you see the Ajax armoured fighting vehicle thing? I mean, yes, so that's what we're going to be facing the Russians with, which?
Richard Prideaux: They'll hear us coming.
Richard Negus: They will hear us coming. You can imagine them saying, “Why are the British…? They're getting out of that vehicle. Now they're running around in circles. They've all fallen over. What's the matter with them? They go, ‘Oh, it's all right. It's just Ajax.’†Yeah. And I saw a brilliant thing. There's a very, very funny feed which you can see on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram called Fill Your Boots. And it's run by an ex-Lance Jack in the Parachute Regiment and he is very, very funny. He collates a lot of squaddie humour as well as having his own on there. And he did this brilliant thing because, in typical indomitable British fashion, about three days before this thing came out that Ajax was absolutely [bleep] and is basically killing its crews. It came out that the people who were, all the civil servants and the civvies who were responsible for the rollout of Ajax won some award at some sort of bean counters thing. Yeah. They had this photograph saying, “Hey, we've won this award for the rollout of Ajax for the British Armyâ€. And he just put one up there. He goes, “Oh, it's great to see that one of the squaddies, who's actually a crewman on one of these vehicles took this photograph,†and it's just this blurred thing.
Richard Prideaux: The whole Ajax thing, there's a really interesting couple of posts from eye-test professional Dominic Cummings.
Richard Negus: Yes.
Richard Prideaux: Over on X, in which he talks about it. They tried to kill Ajax in about 2020.
Richard Negus: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: It explains who pushed it forward and made it happen and how it's completely out of date, which is kind of in keeping with what modern warfare looks like. Vehicles moving around slowly on the battlefield aren't really a good place to be anymore. We've kind of had that and it doesn't really work anymore. But it's very interesting looking at how defence budgets come about and how even with everything we've had in the last ten days since the budget, there's a lot of stuff that we don't hear about very often as well. It's there if you want to go digging, but the information that hits the headlines isn't the whole thing. So it just makes you despair of any sense of how our money is going to be spent. But I don't know, we've got all sorts of things to look forward to, like war and famine and poverty and all sorts of other things. So we're going to go and talk about that in the aftershow because I've got something that was relayed to me today, which I think will be quite good. So we'll go over to that. For the general public, thank you very much. Thank you for listening. And Callum should be back next week and we're going to hopefully do our Christmas episode. Ho ho ho. Pre-Christmas anyway. Right. Bye.
Richard Prideaux: A dog has farted in this room and I think I might expire before the end of this podcast.
Richard Negus: Diet dogs don't fart. Very, very rare. And if they do, it's genteel and doesn't even smell.
Richard Prideaux: I don't believe you.
Richard Negus: No, honestly, they're remarkable. The digestive system of the cocker spaniel is a highly refined thing, and we feed—hold on—hashtag Dr John's Gold with Chicken. I hope they're listening. That seems to do their old system, but I also add a little bit of whatever is left over. So at the moment they're also eating cabbage, Brussels sprouts, carrots, a bit of gravy and some lamb. If they were other dogs, they'd be smelling like a midden, but no, good old cockers.
Richard Prideaux: Or that's based on those leftovers, never mind the cockers. What's your digestive system like?
Richard Negus: Well, you know, I've just burnt it all off. So I think, you know, as soon as it goes in, it's just gone at the moment. For a man of my age, I shouldn't be working so bloody hard.
Richard Prideaux: Well, you've got all those taxes to pay for, haven't you?
Richard Negus: Well, yes, and they keep expanding by the moment.
Richard Prideaux: You've got this weird thing with taxes. Taxes in the UK particularly have been used as a sort of a nudge unit to steer you away from behaviour they'd rather you didn't do. So there's an extra tax on fossil fuels because we'd rather you went to EVs and there's more of a tax on alcohol and smoking because it's bad for you. I can only assume that they don't actually want us to work then.
Richard Negus: No.
Richard Prideaux: Because that seems to be what the steering is.
Richard Negus: Well, I think what they don't want to have happen, and if you actually look at the budget And also a lot of the stealth taxes that have come in, everything from agricultural property relief through to the 20% VAT going on for private school fees and all the various things is what they're actually trying to stop you from doing is being self-employed. They're trying to get you back into being employed by someone else because I think what they don't like is firstly the independence of the self-employed, the small business man or woman, the sole trader, the partnership, the business that possibly employs two or three other people. it's always been something where you've got the Sword of Damocles hanging over you, if you don't get the work in or that you become sick or something like that, you suddenly stop earning and you're in the mire. But on the flip side was it was always the much more tax efficient option. You know, you could run your vehicle through the system. You could put things through for tax, and I don't think they like that. I think they want us to stop being that independent individual. I think they want you back in the system so that you are working for either a large corporation or better still, something within the state itself. I think they want us all, Richard, to become civil servants.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, it does seem that the only thing this is worth doing is working for the state, paying money back into the state in that entirely closed circular system. You don't want to be messy or anything else. So what have you been doing in your rural, disruptive, subversive life today?
Richard Negus: Well, I have been planting hedges rather than laying them. So I like to call it forward planning because in 8 to 10 years time they will have to be laid. So keep yourself in work. But this one's quite interesting because half of it is on farmland where they just wanted to put another hedge because it was a rather big, open and barren field. So they were putting a hedge back in that probably had been there. I would have thought by the boundary trees that are in there. But also I am putting in a hedge to mask the hideousness that is a solar farm. So yes, and that is, I have to say, do you know, Richard, this is a funny thing, is When I've been doing the book tours and stuff like that, and then one of the repeated refrains is, oh, it must be lovely to work out in the beautiful countryside all the time. It's so peaceful. Yeah, right. Okay, this is all I have heard all day whilst I've been planting 750 flipping hedge whips was, keep clear, mind out, mind out, mind out, mind out, because these dudes who are working in the solar farm, they're putting all the electricity cables in. And so there's three guys, one's working in this great big 360 digger, one is working on a dumper truck and another one is the groundworker who's basically putting all the cabling in. So he's got to sit in this ditch. And on this 360 digger, it's got this all-seeing eye that if you come within a certain distance of this vehicle through 360 degrees of it, sees you and goes, mind out, keep clear, mind out, mind out, mind out, mind out. This went on all day. And then in between bouts of when the bloke wasn't stood in front of it, the Royal Air Force decided to fly their sucking great big wastes of money over our head doing aerobatics and other assorted pansiness that the RAF do. So they were doing sort of Top Gun impressions over us. And I thought, yeah, you know them people who said to me, it must be lovely working out there in the beautiful countryside. Well, it was until modern technology came in and ruined it all. Mind out, mind out, mind out.
Richard Prideaux: We say, you know, it can't be turned off and it won't work without it. Presumably there's a speaker there at some level. So what if you take a flat-bladed screwdriver and just goose that speaker? So it's going off but no one can hear it. Maybe dogs can hear it.
Richard Negus: Well, I think a little man actually did come out in the service vehicle. I don't quite know what they were doing, but I think they were trying to see if they could turn this feature off. He stayed all day and it was still going, “Mind out, mind out,†as the sun was setting at four. So obviously he wasn't able to do it. I used to know someone who worked for a professional plumbers' merchant. They had a delivery driver who everyone in the company hated because he was just an idle loafer. He would drive up and wouldn't get out of his cab, so everyone had to unload all the stuff. One of the guys who worked there had been a mechanic or something. The vehicle had one of those things that, when he put it into reverse, went, “Caution, this vehicle's reversing. Caution, this vehicle's reversing.†I don't know how he did it, but he fiddled around with the little box and changed the playback speed. So instead it sounded like Mickey Mouse: “Beep, beep, this vehicle is reversing. Beep, beep, caution, this vehicle is reversing.†Apparently this bloke had no idea how to turn it off, so he drove around for months afterwards. Every time he appeared, there was this Mickey Mouse voice coming out of the back of his vehicle. He knew someone at this depot had done it, but he didn't know who or how they'd done it, and he couldn't turn it off. I thought that was absolutely brilliant. That's a way to get your own back on someone.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, that is. This modern tech for plant machinery doesn't make anything safer, really. All it does is feed into that thing I talked about a few months ago: to do anything on certain sites now, you have to leap through all sorts of hoops for CSCS cards, construction safety and all these other things. You can't get any work done until you've been through an hour-long toolbox talk in a Portakabin before you're allowed out to do your job, which they don't know how to do. They have no idea how to do it, because that's why you're there. But then they're asking, “Are you working safely?†Yeah, sure I am. Just believe me.
Richard Negus: I'm sure that what somebody's done at some point is that they have worked out the cost in lost productivity is probably lower than the potential court case from the various ambulance-chasing lawyers who are waiting like vultures in the wings to swoop. Should anyone sustain an injury at work, then subsequently say, did you have this briefing? Did this individual have this ticket? Was this person made aware of this? Were you given this piece of equipment? Did you have this safety feature on this? And I think that's how you end up with it. A friend of mine, one of the dads at Charlie's rugby, also plays for your favourite place, Richard: Diss Rugby Football Club. I'm fighting the urge—yes, I know. Diss is really good. So you've got Diss, right? Even in Diss they put puns on “Diss is the place†and all this sort of stuff for little cafés and things. Just next door, over into Suffolk, you've got Eye. If you've got a place called Eye, as in eyeball, there are more Eye puns in Eye than you can shake a stick at. It's brilliant. I mean, but unfortunately they haven't got an optician's. I would have just opened an optician's there just for the larks and the laughs. But anyway, but this pal of mine is a senior solicitor for the National Health Service. And he said that the amount of NHS money that goes on paying people for claims, he said, which are largely spurious. But he said, we just work out that there is a threshold which we say, do you know what? It's actually cheaper to pay this [bleep] who is claiming for something that was nobody's fault, or they weren't actually impacted to any degree like they were, but their ambulance-chasing lawyer is suggesting they were. There is a threshold where we say it's just too expensive to go and stand up to these lying thieves, what they basically are. He said, it's just cheaper for us to go and pay up. So when you go and say, Wes Streeting, we'll go and say, we need this X amount of money in the NHS budget. If what we're seeing in the county of Norfolk, where this goes, and the counties of Suffolk, that we know just how much is being forked out, this is happening. in all the counties in England, then no wonder the NHS is just a bottomless hole because there's basically [bleep] lawyers, all these no-win, no-fee lawyers who are out there. They are literally emptying the coffers of the NHS and it's going in no pocket of anyone other than lawyers and people who don't deserve the money.
Richard Prideaux: Depending on when this comes out—well, I know when this is coming out. It's coming out on Thursday for patrons and Friday for everyone else. My next Scribehound article might be out by then, which is abnormal because I'm normally early in the month. It followed a conversation I had a couple of weekends ago. People were suggesting solutions to the question of what to do with game from shoots. If the game dealers aren't buying it, what do you do with all these birds? One suggestion was, “You just need to find a good butcher locally and then people will take them.†It got me thinking that isn't always true. There's a big disparity in disposable income between different parts of the country, particularly at the moment. There are rich parts of the countryside and poor parts, and it isn't always easy to tell. Even when you look at somewhere like Cambridgeshire, it's relatively high earning, but mostly because of Cambridge. Take Cambridge out and the average wages drop right down. So that's what my article is about: basically, you can have half the disposable income from one county to another. Denbighshire to Surrey, I think we have just over half the average earnings.
Richard Negus: Yeah. I would imagine that is precisely it. And I mean, it's awesome. I mean, I'll give our local butcher, Mr Dunnett in Eye. He opens very early and he stays open all day Saturday because a hell of a lot of butchers will actually shut at 1:00 on a Saturday. And I think one of the One of the issues with butchers, and it's why people use supermarkets, is because the supermarket is open when most people have the time to go shopping. And also, who wants to walk around with a shopping bag? The fact is that now car parking is expensive. If you don't park in the supermarket car park, the town centres and their infinite wisdom go and say, well, we'll charge you to park. I'm glad Eye doesn't charge you to park. Although they do send the parking Nazis to put tickets on there. And I felt like going and throttling and then I thought, no, you're only doing your job. But some lunatic in County Hall decided to send people into Eye to put tickets on cars belonging to people who were probably in there shopping and now they're going to go, I'll stuff it. I'll just go to Morrisons in Diss instead. And so then Eye will slowly continue to die. But back to your point about butchers: the problem with a lot of these small shops, they are not open when most people have the time to do their shopping. So it is difficult.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. It's like if you're open 9 till 5, you are saying, and only really open in weekdays, you are saying, I never want to sell to somebody who's got a normal job.
Richard Negus: Yeah, basically. Yeah. I can sell to the elderly, I can sell to the unemployed, and I can sell to the random few who are who are self-employed and might go and say, I must go and do that.
Richard Prideaux: Writers.
Richard Negus: Yeah, writers.
Richard Prideaux: People researching the next piece.
Richard Negus: Exactly. It is bizarre. And I know what we all should do. I mean, Claire's amazing when she goes shopping. She's decided to buy British wherever possible. She's not at the point of buying very expensive coffee from some little artisan roastery because we're not as rich as Croesus. But on the whole, it's British and she buys usually from little independent green grocers and butchers and whatnot. But she's now decided against buying me KitKats, Gold Bars and things like that, or Penguins, for my packed lunch. She is now making her own version of Snickers bars and chocolate bars. Yes. She makes them with dates and things.
Richard Prideaux: That's not normal. That's not normal behaviour.
Richard Negus: She's decided that nothing processed is allowed near us. So nothing that's got palm oil or anything like that in is coming in the house anymore. That's her line in the sand. It actually works out slightly more expensive. But I mean, yeah.
Richard Prideaux: So the next time I come to stay and we're having venison of indeterminate origin outside on the patio, we won't be having BBQ sauce with it unless you've found a way to make it.
Richard Negus: Oh, I know how to make barbecue sauce. I have a recipe and it involves sort of lots of vinegar and stuff, but I use a lot of Worcestershire sauce. It's still made in England, in Worcestershire and by Lea & Perrins. And so I use that rather than HP. And it's not hairshirt-wearing. It's because, you know, you and I write a lot about how stuff should be. This podcast a lot of the time is how stuff should be. So therefore, if we're just paying lip service and actually living on the hog and not doing it, then we're no better than George Monbiot or Guy Shrubsole. Do you know what I mean? So it's something that we do, but it's because Claire is a self-employed potter and she does all this amazing stuff in between bouts of producing beautiful things. So she can do that. Let's be honest. If you're working as a school receptionist, are you going to have the time to do that? Probably not.
Richard Prideaux: Interesting choice of random person to pick there.
Richard Negus: My sister-in-law is a school receptionist. There we go.
Richard Prideaux: I'll say that didn't come out of nowhere. That was planted by the Manchurian candidate in your head.
Richard Negus: Absolutely. Yes, it was exactly. I'll tell Helen that she is the Manchurian candidate.
Richard Prideaux: You and I also are old enough to remember when this used to be the norm. I should probably say that now Callum isn't on this week's episode because I wasn't actually paying attention really to his excuse as to why he couldn't come. It was something to do with work and photography in London, but I don't…
Richard Negus: I think it was something with port, wasn't it?
Richard Prideaux: Is he on tawny port again?
Richard Negus: I think so. He just, I've never known anyone other than John Jorrocks in an R. S. Surtees novel be involved more with port than Callum. And this is crazy. He ought to have gout just by the adjacency that he has to port all the time.
Richard Prideaux: No, there was that point in the Game Fair where we were at one of the weird drinks parties you got us invited to and I'm standing there sweating in the heat, drinking iced tawny port, thinking this is not good for you.
Richard Negus: No, that was in the GWCT, wasn't it? Yeah, I think it was Cockburn's. I think they had sponsored the drinks party there. Yeah, and they had various ports, which I have to say I love port. But to me it just reeks of winter. It is not a summer drink. I mean, if you weren't going to have a beer, now I know that you're quite keen on odd beers, ones you have to drink with a spoon. If you weren't going to have a beer, right, What would you go for in a pub? I'm not talking about sort of, your usual sherry as you mooch around the house with.
Richard Prideaux: An episode of Frasier.
Richard Negus: Exactly.
Richard Prideaux: Commenting on the nuttiness of the sherry.
Richard Negus: But if you were actually out somewhere, what would you have in a pub if it wasn't a beer?
Richard Prideaux: Cider.
Richard Negus: There you go.
Richard Prideaux: Cider is a year-round drink. It can be light, it can be heavy, it can be cold, it can be warm. It is a universal.
Richard Negus: Yes.
Richard Prideaux: The problem is as you get older, cider has more and more of an effect on you, I think, and the sulphites particularly, but cider hangovers, I used to be able to shake off quite easily and now they've sort of latched on a bit.
Richard Negus: Yeah. Do you know, I'm very fortunate is that, you know, because not only do I try and eat British all the time and everything's got to be British other than my car, which is a Subaru. But we beat Japan. So therefore I feel fine about driving.
Richard Prideaux: So you're like British cars or countries we've beaten in war?
Richard Negus: Exactly. That's basically it.
Richard Prideaux: That opens up the market quite broadly. Exactly.
Richard Negus: Yes. So, you know, my claret consumption is without any qualms at all. But the, you know, Aspall's cider down the road from us, although it has since been bought by Coors and is no longer Chevallier Guild family-owned. But Aspall cider has stayed true to itself. And I don't think there are sulphites in that. And so therefore, you can drink it and not get a headache. But it is ridiculously strong. And if you buy their Premier Cru, which is something like 7.5%, and you go, this is very moreish. And you're sort of sipping away on a nice hot day out on the patio out there. And before you know it, you're eating gravel. It's terrible. You know, you start thinking it's a really good idea to jump off the roof.
Richard Prideaux: It sneaks up on you, doesn't it? And then mugs you at the end. See, I grew up on Healey's, so things like Rattler.
Richard Negus: Okay, yeah.
Richard Prideaux: And Rattler is not, it's not really cider, it's sort of sugar and alcohol and regret all in a bottle. Nothing good has ever happened, but a lot of memorable things have happened.
Richard Negus: I'm with you on the cider, but the other thing that I could drink in a pub, see, I couldn't drink a gin and tonic because when I pour myself a gin and tonic, it's quite a hefty slug of gin. And if you go to the landlord and say, can I have a quadruple gin and tonic, please? And I'll need, you know, Can I have a pint of G&T, please? Yeah, my sister used to drink that when she was a yuppie. Yeah, it was quite funny. But anyway, I digress. The only thing that I think I could, I'm with you on the cider, but I think I can go and drink these days because of my advanced years, I think I can drink a glass of red wine now. I think, people look at me and they don't think, “He's a pretentious young manâ€. They now think, oh, look at that dear old thing. He's probably got a dicky bladder. So he's on the wine.
Richard Prideaux: Wine is a nice all-rounder as well, actually. And as you say, it's sort of it's acceptable at your age, but it's just acceptable all round now as well, isn't it? It's the normal choice.
Richard Negus: Well, I was out beating at the weekend, our first day at Rivers Hall, which is my favourite estate in this region, and Mabel likes it very much. And it's always wonderful when you stop for elevenses, because out comes the drink. The gamekeeper there is a wonderful man called Robert Graves. Not the poet, but he is a poet amongst gamekeepers. He's a wonderful, wonderful man. And most of the guys there seem to be related to him in some way. And his brother makes these concoctions. I mean, he's a chip off your block, or you're probably a chip off him because he's a lot older than you, because he footles around in hedges picking stuff. But then he finds the most bizarre spirits to put them with. So you go, oh, what's that then? Oh, that's me damson Cointreau. You what? Well, I take Cointreau and then I put sugar and damsons in it. So you've taken an orange liqueur and you've then put damsons in it and sugar and you try it and you go, cor, blimey. It's like Tixylix, but with a kick. It's utterly bizarre. And then so each time there is this strangely coloured one and he goes, I found this in the back of the cupboard and it's brown. And he goes, what is it? And he goes, I think it's walnut liqueur. And you go, okay, I'll try that. And you go, I'm not getting any walnut, but I am definitely getting, I think it's Lifebuoy soap.
Richard Prideaux: There are two things from that. One is I have no idea where I'd actually get Cointreau. You know, if you said you've got an hour to go and get a bottle of Cointreau, I have no idea where I'd go. I didn't even think they still sold it. And then another thing is you've just broken a memory of my mate Tom trying to make a wild garlic brandy liqueur. Oh my Lord. It smelled like wet spaniel.
Richard Negus: Nice.
Richard Prideaux: It was the least appetising thing you could think of.
Richard Negus: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: But he was convinced it was going to work. But no, wild garlic brandy liqueur, no. If any listeners want to try that, and we'll have to wait till next spring, but if you want to try that, then let us know the results, but please don't bring us a bottle.
Richard Negus: No. What was that weird thing that Avian Sandercock was saying? Didn't he make something like lobster liqueur or something weird?
Richard Prideaux: Oh, yes. Well, yeah, because he's tried everything, alcoholic it seems. Wasn't there some, it was something in, where does he go to? Not the Balearics, Canary Islands, Canary Islands, somewhere overseas, somewhere foreign.
Richard Negus: Devon for him.
Richard Prideaux: Clotted cream.
Richard Negus: Yeah, clotted cream. That's it. Clotted cream. No, just stop it. That's not what it is. Daft as putting damsons and Cointreau together. It's what people do. I can remember when Claire used to work in whisky, the company she worked for tried to rejazzle and bejazzle Bailey's and they had to make a vegan Bailey's because that was it when...
Richard Prideaux: Cow juice, yeah.
Richard Negus: They didn't like that bit being in there. And so they made a big deal out of the fact that it had almond water. I'm not going to call it milk because it's not.
Richard Prideaux: Almond squeezings.
Richard Negus: Almond squeezings, yes, quite. And you know, you think, just stop it. I mean, obviously, thank God, veganism is now like the Draylon slacks. It is no longer a fashionable thing. And if you are still a vegan, then you're in it for the long haul and I salute you. But thank God, the fashion thing of being a vegan has now gone and you don't have a stupid extra page that no one looks at in a pub or restaurant menu.
Richard Prideaux: No, sort of wild game and eating venison and things like that are actually now getting quite trendy, which can only be a good thing. We were talking about that at the job I was working at today, but something else came up in that conversation or just after that. And I thought, I'm going to save this for the podcast tonight because this could go one of two ways. Let's see. So I want you to think about today's date. It is the 2nd of December, 2025. I'd just like you to visualise that now. So, you know, how do you visualise time? So think about where you are now on our date. Where's January? Where's next January from you?
Richard Negus: Next January.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, not the one we had 11 months ago. Next January after Christmas.
Richard Negus: It's a month away, isn't it?
Richard Prideaux: But can you point to it?
Richard Negus: Yeah, okay.
Richard Prideaux: One o'clock.
Richard Negus: If it's a clock, one o'clock.
Richard Prideaux: One o'clock. So it's sort of a circle. So are your years a circle?
Richard Negus: Yes, probably, because I live a cyclical life. So yes, probably.
Richard Prideaux: So this is the thing we were trying to work out. Do people who work with seasons and farmers and growers, because it was a farmer I was talking to, do you see things as just a circle? So you have a big reset at Christmas and then it all starts over again. Or are you like someone else who was there, who sees time as a ladder? So you're going up the ladder and the future's up there and the past is down there below you.
Richard Negus: No, you see, I'm very much… That's very interesting.
Richard Prideaux: I know it's good. What is it?
Richard Negus: I very much do, because I live such a cyclical life. I'm always thinking, “Oh, the hedge-laying season has nearly come round again,†and then the hedge-laying season is here. I very much see an arm of a clock going round and coming back. And I think you're on to something there. I think people who depend upon, doesn't matter whether you're a farmer, a gardener, a hedger, coppicer, anyone who relies upon the natural world, I think they would see time in a circle. Whereas those who are less land-based would, exactly as you say, see time going off like the writing at the start of Star Wars.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah.
Richard Negus: How interesting.
Richard Prideaux: I've tried this with different people over the years and it's very interesting to hear the responses. Some people just go, what are you talking about? You can't see time. And it's like, well, you're a very boring person then, aren't you? I don't want to talk to you. But anyone who comes up with, oh yeah, well, I can see it like this. It's like, all right, there's a wedge there that's worth having a conversation with you. The next one is years. So if you think back to, say, the year 2000 from here, where is that relative to you now?
Richard Negus: You see that's interesting because I think about it in seasons as in I'll say last season we did this because it used to be when it was the hunting when hunting was my job it was I'd say that'd be season 93–94 and the rest of us, the rest of the time didn't really matter, and now it's much the same. So, yeah, I see years in seasons and I almost I hark back when I think back in time. Oh, I can remember that. That's when I did that hedge there. And so I think back on a landmark in it, because I can remember that year because I did that hedge then or a landmark figure for it. But most of the time I don't talk about years because my year is not actually 2025, then it's 2026 and then 27 and so on. I'm working season 25–26 at the moment, so therefore, I don't really actually think that the 1st of January in a way is the start of the year. I almost see it as midway through, I suppose.
Richard Prideaux: No, because I'm changing around because I used to do more when we had the wild food business and I used to, you know, I was foraging commercially amongst other things. We were starting a season in February; that was the first time we were sending anything out and you used to get almost depressed from November through to January because nothing was growing.
Richard Negus: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: So there was nothing to do. And then you start looking ahead to the season and it just builds to this crescendo in the summer and then starts to tail off again. So it was all about the growing season and my friend, a market gardener I was talking to today. Hello, Phil. He was basically saying the same thing because he's doing his veg boxes and all of this other stuff. There are basically potatoes and root crops and a few other bits that are going out at the moment, but it's going to tail off and then he'll start prepping the ground again for next year in February. Everyone must have their own little cycle of start and finish, which has got nothing to do with the, what are we, Gregorian or Julian calendar.
Richard Negus: We're Gregorian.
Richard Prideaux: We're Gregorian.
Richard Negus: Yeah. See, it's interesting because we didn't actually go out to work yesterday because it was peeing down. So we decided that planting hedges in the wet is dull anyway, but also where we were on that Norfolk clay, well, it just would slow us down to such a degree that it probably wouldn't have been profitable.
Richard Prideaux: Oh, you'd be 4 inches taller after 5 steps as well.
Richard Negus: Oh, absolutely. And the spade is just… everything's [unclear], so we didn't go. So I wrote my Scribehound piece yesterday, and I wrote it about the author Robert Smith Surtees, R. S. Surtees, most famous for the character John Jorrocks, and Mr Facey Romford's Hounds and Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour. But I noticed something when I'd gone back and started to reread them chronologically all through. I've got his entire works and I started reading again. And I noticed in there that there was a lot of relevance for today because of the challenges that the countryside had in Surtees' time, we're talking about him starting in the late 1830s and he died in about 1865 when he was writing them. So, you know, the end of Georgian and start of the Victorian to the height of the Victorian era, really, I suppose. But it's quite fascinating because all the things that he's whinging about are all exactly the self-same factors that we see now. They haven't got the luxuries of modern tractors and things like that so what you're seeing in these 1830s books comes back to your point that it's very much a cycle. And then I thought, well, it's not only a cycle that he's talking about, but the whole countryside is a cycle because we're going through one of those phases at the moment. We're back in Shitsville at the moment because forces beyond the control of those of us who work the land have put us through an agricultural depression. And he's writing around the time of the repeal of the corn laws and a crash in agricultural productivity and profitability during an agricultural depression. So I'm reading a book that was written in 1840 and it's exactly relevant today. Yes, it's a bit long-winded and Victorian in his language, but the subject matter could have been written this week by one of us in Scribehound. And so I wrote it about that. So it's rather apposite that you had this conversation with your mate about time and the future in the past.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, that's interesting because the cyclical nature of these events is captured in that overused phrase that does get used a lot by people who, for some reason, are obsessed with jiu-jitsu and lifting kettlebells, which is: “Hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times,†or something like that. That's the sort of four-stage cycle. But I read a thing—it's one of these things you read on Twitter and then you go and read it and go, oh yeah, I quite like that and you can't remember who sent it to you or where it was, I can't reference it, but it was talking about this thing of collapse of empires because everyone's talking about actually, you know, are we at the end of the American Empire? Is it collapsing like Rome did? And one of the bits the author brought in there was about cycles. And you actually get cycles within an empire. But what happens is the cycle rate gets shorter. So you get the same things happening every 100 years, but then it's every 85 years and then it's every 50 years. And as that cycle gets shorter between similar things happening, that's sort of the doom spiral of an empire. So maybe, if you're applying it to the rural side of things, [unclear]. Are we losing a decade every century? I think so.
Richard Negus: I think so. And I think it's one of those things that we probably have been a bit feather bedded here in Britain. Because although we have had depressions and downsides, really, I suppose, probably since the Elizabethan era. We've been [unclear]. Yes, we went and got our empire and we did all this wonderful stuff. And we've got to face the fact is that, yes, we can slag off Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer. It's very easy to do. I mean, it is so easy to do. I mean, it's almost, you know, taking-candy-from-babies territory. But all they have done is hasten the end. That's all they've done. It's not like they've caused this great big malady that we've got in this country. Their ineptitude has just sped it up. And probably the genius of Rishi Sunak, let's be honest, it was largely him, is he managed to paper over the cracks more effectively than any other chancellor for a long while. But we've been on a slow spiral into shitness since we won the Second World War. That's basically what's happened. And we've been going, and then this lot came in and went, bang. And we're just, this is the crash. I mean, that's the acceptance of it. And I think perhaps Britain is going to have to get used to the idea that we're actually a bit [bleep]. The countries like Italy and Poland that we used to laugh at 10 years ago are now the country that we were 10 years ago and we are now in the Italy and Poland territory and we just ought to perhaps accept our fate and if the cycle analogy is correct then we will start to spiral up. Will this be turned around by a storming Reform government, probably not. What they'll actually have to do is they're just going to they're going to really inherit the shitville and they'll have to make such hard decisions. Everyone's going to hate them. And then probably the Conservatives will come limping in like the sort of, you know, when you have one of those horse races where you've got three hot favourites and you've got one thing that looks like it should be pulling the beer wagon for Whitbread. Yes. Yeah. So you've got the three hot favourites, and they're racing round and the poor old cart horse is three fences behind and basically the three hot favourites bring one another down at the second last and good old Dobbin is lobbing along. I think that's what the Conservatives are going to be like. They're going to be like this old Dobbin is they're going to come back and they're going to say, “Hello, we're back now. We're going to go and just sort everything out because we'll have a great excitement with reform. Everyone's then going to go, I don't like them. They're telling us the truth all the time. It's horrible. We don't like it. That's someone who's going to sort it out. And they'll be like, Nanny McPhee, the Conservatives have come back in with some man in a grey suit in charge and go, okay, let's sort it all out.
Richard Prideaux: With any luck, we'll be at war with Russia before then anyway. So it'll just distract everyone, won't it?
Richard Negus: Well, it will do. Yes, I mean, that'd be great. Did you see the Ajax armoured fighting vehicle thing? I mean, yes, so that's what we're going to be facing the Russians with, which?
Richard Prideaux: They'll hear us coming.
Richard Negus: They will hear us coming. You can imagine them saying, “Why are the British…? They're getting out of that vehicle. Now they're running around in circles. They've all fallen over. What's the matter with them? They go, ‘Oh, it's all right. It's just Ajax.’†Yeah. And I saw a brilliant thing. There's a very, very funny feed which you can see on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram called Fill Your Boots. And it's run by an ex-Lance Jack in the Parachute Regiment and he is very, very funny. He collates a lot of squaddie humour as well as having his own on there. And he did this brilliant thing because, in typical indomitable British fashion, about three days before this thing came out that Ajax was absolutely [bleep] and is basically killing its crews. It came out that the people who were, all the civil servants and the civvies who were responsible for the rollout of Ajax won some award at some sort of bean counters thing. Yeah. They had this photograph saying, “Hey, we've won this award for the rollout of Ajax for the British Armyâ€. And he just put one up there. He goes, “Oh, it's great to see that one of the squaddies, who's actually a crewman on one of these vehicles took this photograph,†and it's just this blurred thing.
Richard Prideaux: The whole Ajax thing, there's a really interesting couple of posts from eye-test professional Dominic Cummings.
Richard Negus: Yes.
Richard Prideaux: Over on X, in which he talks about it. They tried to kill Ajax in about 2020.
Richard Negus: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: It explains who pushed it forward and made it happen and how it's completely out of date, which is kind of in keeping with what modern warfare looks like. Vehicles moving around slowly on the battlefield aren't really a good place to be anymore. We've kind of had that and it doesn't really work anymore. But it's very interesting looking at how defence budgets come about and how even with everything we've had in the last ten days since the budget, there's a lot of stuff that we don't hear about very often as well. It's there if you want to go digging, but the information that hits the headlines isn't the whole thing. So it just makes you despair of any sense of how our money is going to be spent. But I don't know, we've got all sorts of things to look forward to, like war and famine and poverty and all sorts of other things. So we're going to go and talk about that in the aftershow because I've got something that was relayed to me today, which I think will be quite good. So we'll go over to that. For the general public, thank you very much. Thank you for listening. And Callum should be back next week and we're going to hopefully do our Christmas episode. Ho ho ho. Pre-Christmas anyway. Right. Bye.